I don't answer, and the not-answering is its own kind of answer. "The guards," she begins.
"Elowen."
"No." Not loud. Precise. "The guards were in position before you arrived at the village. I noticed them coming through the market — two of them, moving ahead of you. Which means they were already following me." She takes one step toward me. "Which means you knew I'd gone to Duskmire before I told you."
I hold the corridor between us.
"You had them tracking my route."
"I had them ensuring your route."
"That is the same damn thing." Her voice drops in the specific way it does when she is being exact rather than angry. "I walked into a village full of people being told I'm the reason their homes are falling down, with your soldiers already placed around me, and you didn't once consider telling me."
"I considered it."
"And?"
"And I decided the risk of you altering your behavior was greater than the risk of?—"
"Of deceiving me." She finishes it without heat, which is somehow worse.
I take her arm — her uninjured side, wrist rather than shoulder — and pull her through the nearest door. A sitting room, unused at this hour, and close the door.
She doesn't pull free. She stands and waits.
"You went back to that village," I commence, and my voice has lost the controlled surface I intended to maintain. "After a beast had already been driven into the center of it." I let go of her wrist. "I put soldiers on your route because I could not be in two places at once."
Her expression shifts. Not softened — reading.
"Every betrayal I have survived in this manor began with someone identifying what I could not afford to lose." The words arrive without structure. "A preference. An attachment. A point of vulnerability that could be turned against my judgment. Every single one." I look at her directly. "I have spent a long time making sure nothing qualified."
The lamp flame bends in a draft from beneath the door.
"You terrify me," I acknowledge. "Not what you do. Not your defiance or your habit of walking into things without adequate preparation." I stop. Start again, lower. "The thought of you not being in this manor. That terrifies me."
She doesn't say anything. Then, her hand comes up to space between us, hovering at the level of my chest.
"Draekir." My name leaves her mouth as something careful. "I'm not going anywhere."
She steps forward. I don't step back. The distance thins, and her face tilts upward, and my hand comes to her jaw —
Suddenly, the bell strikes. Not the household bell. The outer perimeter alarm — three short strikes in a cluster, the pattern Vuldren's hunters use only when something has already breached the boundary wall.
I release her and move through the door before the third strike finishes calling, pulling it shut behind me, already calling for Vuldren.
Whatever is coming, it is closer than anything before it.
15
ELOWEN
The tunnels beneath Mournhold are dark, damp, and make me feel uneasy. Nyssara moves ahead like she's done this walk before. She told me yesterday she thinks I'm good for Draekir. She's had me questioning what she knows, but I didn't dare dig for the information.
It begins to narrow as we descend, the ceiling dropping until Nyssara has to angle her lamp sideways to keep it from scraping stone. The walls change down here — the dressed stonework of the upper passages giving way to raw rock face, that's when I first see it.
A vein. Pale and threaded, running horizontally at shoulder height, branching up in irregular forks the way mineral deposits do, except these pulse. Nyssara stops beside me.
"It appeared two weeks ago," she advises. "It's spread twelve feet since."
